GODS OF RIVERWORLD

"Then," Burton said slowly, "the standards, the ethical goals, are not so extremely high, so demanding, as we have been led to believe?"

"They are high, though not impossibly high for forty percent of the resurrectees."

"The other sixty percent?" Alice said.

"Their body-records will be destroyed."

"That seems hard."

"It is. But it's absolutely necessary."

"And then?" Frigate said. He looked anxious.

"The survivors will be carried, as body-records in the form of the yellow sphere, to Earth."

"Earth?" Burton said. He had never been told so, but he had had the feeling that Earth had been destroyed.

"Yes. Most of life on Earth was killed by radiation in the hydrogen and neutron bomb war. But the Gardenworlders have cleaned it up—it took them one hundred and sixty years—and have been restocking it with plant and animal life. Earth will be ready for you, but you won't be the kind of people who will abuse it and slowly kill it by pollution. And—"

"Then we won't be permitted to have children?" Alice said.

"Not on Earth. It won't have room, though there will be plenty of living room, I think you call it elbow space, for you. However, there are millions of planets without sentient life in this universe, and you can go there if you want children."

"Earth!" Burton said dreamily. His homesickness was so keen that his chest ached. Earth. It would not be the Earth he had left, but surely its topography had not changed. And that it would not be the Earth that had existed when he had died was, he had to admit, for the good.

"This is quite a shock," Alice said. "I was a devout member of the Anglican Church and then, when I came here, I lost my faith and became an agnostic until recently, when I was seriously considering joining the Church of the Second Chance. Now ..."

"Loga," Burton said, "since you are finally telling the truth, tell me this. Why did you turn renegade and pervert the course of events that your fellow Ethicals had decided upon? Is your story that you could not bear that your family, your loved ones, might not Go On, the truth? Go On in the sense you've just explained, not the old sense? Did you cause all this blood struggle, this overthrow of your comrades, just to give your parents and siblings and cousins more time?"

"I swear to you by all that was, is, or might be holy that that is the truth."

"Well, then," Burton said, "I don't understand how you, who were raised on the Gardenworld from the age of four, could have passed the test. If the Ethical standards have any meaning, any value, how did you escape being eliminated? How could yoti have become a criminal? A criminal with a conscience, but still a criminal. Or were you truly ethical, and then, somehow, you became crazy? And if you can become crazy, what's to prevent others who've also passed from going insane?"

38

Loga paled, turned, set the goblet on a table, and turned again. He was smiling, and his eyes moved from left to right and back again as if he were looking for something beyond the group.

"I'm not crazy!"

"Consider all that you've done for the sake of a score or so of people," Burton said.

"I am not crazy! What I did, I did for love."

"Love has its insanities," Burton said. He leaned back in his chair, blew cigar smoke out, smiled, and said, "It doesn't, for the moment, matter if you are insane or not. You still haven't answered us. Must we go back to The Valley or may we stay here?"

"I had thought you could stay," Loga said. "I had judged that you had attained the level where you could be trusted and where we could all enjoy each other's company in love. You could bring in others. I intend to bring in my family and show them what they must do if they would be immortal. Some of them ..."

"You're doubtful about some of them, then?" Burton said.

Frigate leaned over the table and, staring hard at Loga, said, "We were told that passing the test, Going On, was an automatic event. It involved no judging by human beings. Now ... who judges?"

Burton was a

"That will be done by the Computer. After that, the people in this project, the Valleydwellers, will eat food that will cause them to fall asleep and die. Their wathans will then be sca

"Judging by a machine?" Frigate said.

"It is infallible."

"Unless it's tampered with," Burton said.

"That is not very likely."

"Not until you made it likely," Burton said.

Loga glared at him. "I won't be here."

"Where will you be?"

"I will have gone on one of the ships in the hangar to an uninhabited planet."

"You could have done that at any time after you got rid of your fellow Ethicals and their Agents," Frigate said. "Why didn't you just pick up your family and take them with you?"

Loga looked at Frigate as if he just could not believe that anybody would say that. "No, I couldn't do that."

"Why not?" Burton said. "It seems the logical action to take."

"They wouldn't be ready. They wouldn't have passed the test; the Computer would reject them. They'd be doomed."

"You don't make sense," Frigate said. "What do you care about that? You'd be safe on some planet where they wouldn't find you for a thousand years, maybe never, and you'd have your family."

Loga frowned, and sweat oozed on his forehead. "You don't understand. They shouldn't be living then. They would not have Gone On. I couldn't take them until they had attained the level that makes immortality bearable for them."

The others looked at each other. Unspoken: he is crazy.

Burton sighed and leaned forward, reached under the table, and withdrew from its shelf a beamer that had been there since the day the castle was built. His finger moved the dial on its side to stun-power. He brought the weapon out swiftly and pressed the sliding tongue that acted as the trigger. The very pale red line struck Loga in the chest, and the Ethical fell backwards.

"I had to do it," Burton said. "He is hopelessly psychotic and he would have sent us back to The Valley. God knows what he would have done then."

At Burton's orders, Frigate ran to get from a converter a hypodermic syringe containing the needed amount of somnium. Burton stood guard, waiting to stun Loga again if he showed signs of consciousness. The man was immensely powerful; a bolt that would knock most men out might make him only semiconscious.

Burton paced for a few minutes while he thought of how he could solve the problem of Loga. He had to be kept alive. The moment he was dead, he would undoubtedly be resurrected in a hidden chamber. That would mean finit for the four tenants because Loga had prime control of the Computer. If he were put in a cryogenics cylinder, he would be dead as far as the wathan was concerned, and he would be resurrected in a secret room in the tower. Should he be awake but imprisoned, he could kill himself no matter what security arrangements his captors took. Even if the tiny black ball in his brain, the ball that could release a deadly poison with one mentally projected codeword, were surgically removed, Loga could swallow his tongue and choke to death. The tongue could be cut out, but Burton was not -tough enough to do that no matter how desperate he was.